The world didn't end with an explosion.
It ended with a sound.
A hairline crack, like glass under a slow thumb. The first people who noticed weren't looking up—they were the ones close enough to feel the air stiffen in their lungs, to taste metal.
I stop. The crowd slides around me, annoyed, unaware. Noon sun knifes between towers; reflections glitter across bus windows and shop glass. Someone laughs. Somewhere a truck reverses, beeping, simple and human and safe.
Then the sky… folds.
Not light, not darkness—absence. A vertical seam opens over the crosswalk, thin as a razor until it isn't, until the edges curl back and show a place that looks like depth without distance.
The screaming starts one second later.
People scatter. Bags drop. A phone clatters, spins, lands face-up with a lock screen of a sleeping dog. I don't move. My body thinks this is a dream and my mind is busy taking notes.
Vectors, angles, surfaces. My brain draws lines I've never learned to draw.
It steps out.
Humanoid in the way a mannequin is humanoid. Carapace that drinks light. Fingers that end in tools, not nails. Heat warps the air around its forearms; the tar beneath its feet blisters and smokes. Its head tilts, not curious—calibrating.
My throat is dry. The smart move is to run. The human move is to freeze.
I do neither. Something like hunger tightens behind my ribs.
It looks at me.
For one obscene instant, the thing lowers its head. Subtle. A fraction. Enough for my spine to understand: predators recognize threats.
"Move!" a stranger barks, slamming my shoulder as he sprints past. Sirens spool up in the distance, building like a storm grinding its teeth.
The creature's right arm hums; a blade extrudes, dull-red, heat-haze stuttering. It steps. I step, too—left foot forward, weight inside, the way you enter between closing doors.
Stupid. This is stupid.
My hands are empty. The closest thing that qualifies as a weapon is a bent steel bollard ripped half out of the sidewalk where a delivery van clipped it last week. I grab it. My skin sticks to sun-hot metal.
The thing lunges. The blade shrieks through air; I duck and feel it kiss the back of my hoodie, threads parting. The world compresses down to lines: its hip joint stutters a degree on extension; the knee on that side compensates late; the next strike will overreach.
Left, then inside.
I move before the thought finishes. The bollard claps against jointed armor—metal on something not metal. Not hollow. The shock rattles my teeth. A seam opens where plates overlap; thin red vapor hisses out, copper-sweet and electric.
It screams like a radio detuned to pain.
"Come on," I hear myself say, the words flat. "Show me."
It obliges. The blade scythes low; I vault, plant on its forearm, shove down, and the tip gouges sparks from asphalt instead of my legs. My knee drives into a gap under its breastplate; the bollard wedges deeper into the split at the hip. Pressure. Leverage. Give me a lever and a fulcrum—
Bone or whatever it has gives with a wet crack.
It stumbles. Heat kisses my face; the stink of scorched tar crawls into my mouth. People have stopped fleeing far enough to watch again, because humans always do. They want to know if this is survivable.
It is, I think. For me.
For a heartbeat, the fracture overhead widens—like a throat considering another swallow. A shadow shifts beyond it, larger. No.
"Finish it," I whisper.
The creature throws its weight. I ride the motion, pivot around its shoulder, and bring the bollard down two-handed into the notch where head meets torso. The impact is thunder in my wrists. Something shears. The red inside flickers—then steadies.
Not done.
The blade punches backward blind; I let go, drop, feel it pass over my scalp and torch the air behind me. Neighbors I can't see gasp. That shadow beyond the seam leans closer.
No time.
I hook my fingers into the hot seam I made and pull.
The carapace is slick; the edge bites my palms. Heat blooms. The seam parts like a book that didn't want to be read. Inside there isn't blood. There's structure. Lattices that look grown and machined at once, humming with a low, angry frequency.
I don't know what I'm doing until I'm doing it. My hand closes around a rod of bone-crystal slotted through the joint—a pin. It vibrates under my skin like a voice I can't hear yet.
Take it.
The thought isn't mine. It doesn't even have words. It's a hunger wearing a suggestion like a mask.
I pull.
The pin tears free. The sound it makes is exactly like biting tinfoil with a filling—electric and wrong. The creature screams again, high and fracturing, and collapses across its ruined hip.
The pin scorches my palm. It shouldn't fit, but it does; my hand knows where to put it because I've always had it and also never had it. The world tilts. The sirens slide out of tune. Every surface sprouts numbers and distances and arrows not real enough to see but real enough to act on.
A cold wind moves through my head and takes something with it.
No—
My fingers spasm. The pin clatters to the street, smoking. I sway, suddenly hollowed out, sudden as stepping off an invisible curb. What did it take?
I drag breath like it's heavy. My mouth tastes like pennies. I stare at the thing dying at my feet and feel nothing.
Not nothing.
Less.
"Hands where I can see them!"
The voice snaps the street back into shape. A police drone buzzes low, blue strobes washing glass; a city defense van brakes hard and vomits four armored responders—masks, rifles, shoulder badges that didn't exist last month. The nearest sees my hands, the split carapace, the pin on the ground still bleeding light.
He doesn't shoot. He hesitates.
"Back away from the entity!" he barks. "Slowly!"
Entity. Me or it?
I raise my palms. They're blistered and raw. The responder's eyes flick to my knuckles, my face, the seam overhead widening with a sound like a zipper tugged through wet leather.
"Second breach!" someone yells from the van. "Topside! Two signatures!"
The responder's mask turns toward the sky. I don't.
Because the creature at my feet is still looking at me. Its head never moved but something inside moved, and I can feel the focus like a wire from its chest to mine.
Predators recognize threats.
A tremor runs up my spine. Not fear. Not exactly.
Recognition.
I step back, heel crunching glass. The pin hums more softly now. The hunger that told me to take it is gone, or sleeping with one eye open.
What did I lose?
A smell lives on the edge of my tongue—chlorine and apple shampoo. A laugh in a kitchen. A half-remembered hum under a door. I reach for it and my hand closes on air.
"Kid!" Another responder, voice closer. "You injured?"
I look at my palms. Pink, glossy. The blisters have already thinned around the edges, skin knitting like time hiccuped and came back believer.
"No," I say. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone I used to know.
The seam above us yawns. The crowd ripples backward. The responders level rifles, but the one with the mask and the eyes doesn't aim at the sky. He's watching me.
"On your knees," he says. Not hostile. Not friendly. Careful, like handling wires you can't afford to cross. "Hands behind your head."
I could obey.
I could run.
The pin is still there, inches from my shoe, faintly red, faintly wrong. My fingers twitch. The world arranges lines for me without asking: escape paths, impact vectors, the angle his knee would break at if I needed it to.
The hunger stirs, hopeful.
I close my eyes, and try to remember the laugh that smelled like apples.
Nothing.
"I said—"
A shape moves inside the seam: larger than a bus, articulated like a centipede that learned to stand. Rifles bark. The air turns to nails. The seam tears wider, and the sound it makes is the sound of a world discovering it can scream louder.
I open my eyes.
"Don't," I tell the hunger, and I don't know who I'm warning.
I bend, pick up the pin, and the street falls into place around me like I was born holding it.